Drs. Bova and Coffey at Johns Hopkins have done extensive studies of genomic alterations in prostate cancer and have found a strong tendency for certain chromosomes to be deleted or gained; other chromosome are rarely deleted or gained. They have also studied telomere length in prostate cancer. Their hypothesis is that the tendency toward loss events on specific chromosomes may be related to chromosome-specific telomere length differences. It would be best to study these lengths in specimens isolated directly from patients but since metaphase chromosome are difficult to obtain in quantity from these samples, we are going to initially use prostate cancer cell lines. Cell lines have been obtained and separate populations of chromosomes 7 and 8 are being isolated for i) generating chromosome specific probes and ii) for telomere length assays.